The day of the final inspection of Fort George was a particularly poignant occasion for Conley and the CNSA team. The shipbuilders had done their best to present the ship, with its myriad of compartments, to the highest of standards, and even the directors and senior managers had rolled up their sleeves and helped with the final clean and finish. Overnight, a large team of cleaning ladies had worked hard to present every compartment, large or small, in a pristine condition. When the CNSA inspection team arrived early the following morning, these ladies were cheerfully checking off, clearly very proud of another fine Tyneside ship.
The inspection itself went very well and when it was complete in the early evening all who had partaken in it were invited to enjoy a can of beer in the ship’s wardroom. Sitting there contentedly at the conclusion of the task, Conley could not but help noticing the insecure and concerned demeanour of many of the shipyard people, who were only too well aware of the contrast between his own secure future and their very precarious one.
Things were much brighter at Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde. This shipyard, owned by GEC-Marconi, was in better shape under the redoubtable chairmanship of Clydeside shipbuilder, Sir Robert Easton. The latter’s son, Murray, was his managing director, and the yard was doing well in its construction of a number of Type 23 frigates. It had much better undercover fabrication facilities than Swan Hunter and was also set to benefit from greater numbers of future frigate orders owing to the financial difficulties of the Tyneside company.
However, visiting the yard for the first time on a very wet and windy January day, Conley watched the struggles of a group of painters trying to apply a special non-slip coating to the flight deck of HMS Monmouth lying in the exposed fitting-out basin. Whilst the deck was protected to some extent by polythene screening, the conditions were quite unsuitable to apply any paint, let alone a specialist coating such as was required, and he doubted how durable it would be. Ideally, such external painting of the ship should have been carried out undercover, as it would have been in most yards in the world. Conley also noted the depressing fact that many fittings and prefabricated parts of the ship were being sourced from overseas: the anchor made in Spain, the upper deck guardrails in Sweden were but two examples. British shipbuilding had declined to such an extent that many of the British firms which had once made ancillary equipment had long since gone, and matters were now beyond redemption.
At sea on contractor’s sea trials, Conley was highly impressed by the Type 23’s handling and its very responsive combined gas turbine and diesel-electric power train. With a quiet acoustic signature and a low radar silhouette, these vessels, which would build up to a class of sixteen, had been designed specifically to conduct anti-submarine towed array operations in the Norwegian Sea. Six Fort-class RFAs, armed with Sea Wolf antiaircraft missile systems, were planned to provide them with logistic support but, in the event, in the post-Cold War era only the two mentioned above were built, the Fort George and Fort Victoria. Although there were facilities for Sea Wolf in both ships, the missile system was never installed.
The main initial shortcoming of the Type 23 frigate class was that the early vessels were not fitted with a command system. This was needed to make the ship effective in combat. Furthermore, the Merlin helicopter they were planned to carry was experiencing technical delays. As for the sonar carried in the new frigates, Conley was convinced that there was an intrinsic signal-processing problem with their hull-mounted sonar set, as its submarine detection capability compared unfavourably with other similar systems. He reported his concerns accordingly but, not for the first time, experienced a very lethargic response from the responsible project team.
It seemed incomprehensible to him, a submariner steeped in the cut and thrust of Cold War operations, that the surface element of the Royal Navy appeared to have lost all pride in its ships and people being leaders in anti-submarine warfare — the fundamental skill that had saved the country in the Battle of the Atlantic.
To this profound anxiety he could add a further defect: the frigate’s single 4.5in Mark 8 fully automatic gun tended to jam after a few rounds had been fired. To his despair, it seemed to Conley that Royal Navy gunnery had hardly advanced since his Cambrian days.
Conley left the Procurement Executive in the summer of 1994. He was not sorry to depart. Although he had very much enjoyed working with the shipbuilders, there had been too many frustrations and a sense of personal impotence. His sparring with the Trident project had achieved successes, but in pressing the case for improving the SSBN’s sonar system, he felt he had ploughed a very lonely furrow. What he could not comprehend was that many of his colleagues on the Procurement Executive’s staff with whom he had engaged had had brilliant intellects, and were dedicated and committed to the Royal Navy. Why, therefore, was the organisation so dysfunctional?
To him, it could be all summed up by his experience soon after joining, when he made a courtesy call upon the senior civil servant at Foxhill, the Chief of the Underwater Systems Executive, who was responsible for the procurement of submarines and all underwater equipment and weapons. During the meeting Conley had raised the issue of the very poor results of a recent series of Spearfish trial firings. The mandarin had responded that he did not know about the Spearfish problems and furthermore he went on to express little, if any, interest in them.
Such a dismissive response should, he mused later, have sounded a warning call. What was clear to Conley after his experiences of the procurement process was that, despite periodic intensive reviews and reorganisations, it remained very inefficient and in many cases badly managed. It was thus both expensive to the taxpayer and in general unsuited to providing those going into harm’s way with the best equipment affordable within the defence budget set by the government of the day. Conley afterwards reflected ruefully that during his time in the PE there was no one within the Royal Navy’s hierarchy energetically and aggressively pursuing the necessary reforms, and all future significant change was to be driven by external initiatives.
19
The Awesome World of Nuclear Weapons
In July 1994 Conley arrived on the seventh floor of the Ministry of Defence main building in Whitehall, colloquially known as the ‘Madhouse’, to join the directorate responsible for nuclear weapons policy and planning. He would be the Royal Naval captain who was specifically responsible for nuclear weapons target planning.
At this time, the Soviet Union was disintegrating under the turbulent leadership of Boris Yeltsin, and there existed the very real threat of nuclear proliferation in those former Soviet states which had nuclear weapon bases within their territory, although these were supposedly being dismantled. In the West, populations were seeking the so-called ‘peace dividend’ and within the United Kingdom the 1991 ‘Options for Change’ defence reduction programme was just the start of two decades of protracted contraction in the size and strength of the country’s armed forces. Meanwhile security agencies such as MI6 and the listening complex at GCHQ at Cheltenham were grappling with a rapid change of priorities from the confrontation of the Cold War in Europe to the troubled Middle East. It was into this not so brave new world that the Trident nuclear missile system was entering service as the replacement for Polaris, and already many within the defence establishment considered it was an upgrade that the United Kingdom could ill afford. This would manifest itself by pressure being applied to the assumption that the Royal Navy required four SSBNs to maintain the status quo of a minimum of one on operational patrol at any given time.